The Friendship of Mortals

by Audrey Driscoll

  Chapter 1

  “Charles, my boy,” old Crawford said, “I can’t imagine why you would want to bother with a benighted backwater like Miskatonic University.”

  “It’s only fifty miles from Boston,” I said. “Hardly the back of beyond.”

  “That’s not what I meant. A university is a place of higher learning, not a jumped-up lunatic asylum.”

  “Oh surely it isn’t that bad, Mr. Crawford,” I said. “After all, it’s been there since 1738.”

  “So has Bedlam. At least that long, and it’s still full of lunatics. Persistence is no guarantee of quality.”

  “But what is it about Miskatonic that makes you say that?” Crawford was a Harvard man through and through. I had heard him say similar (if less venomous) things about Yale and Princeton. But he’d stopped short of calling them lunatic asylums.

  “Well, just look at some of the faculty – there’s one fellow there, now what’s his name? Quidlington, Quizzington, something like that. He’s supposed to be a professor of philosophy, but I’ve read some of the drivel he’s published. It has nothing to do with philosophy, for one thing, and no grounding in scientific or logical principles of any sort. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they have a School of Alchemy at Miskatonic. Or that the Medical School teaches divination by entrails, as though it’s the Dark Ages, not 1910! Believe me, you don’t want to get mixed up with a place like that. They do seem to have a lot of money, though,” he added. “Lots of wealthy alumni, eager to keep the place going for some reason.”

  “Well, if there are that many graduates with money to spare for their alma mater, it must be doing something right,” I said.

  Crawford snorted. “You can’t assume they made their money as a result of what they learned at Miskatonic.”

  When I said my goodbyes, I reassured Mr. Crawford I would think long and hard before I accepted any offer of employment from Miskatonic. He was an old friend of my late father’s and a man worthy of my respect. But of course I did no such thing, even though I found out afterward that there was some basis for his misgivings.

  For Miskatonic was the university that sent a team of professors and students to the Antarctic in a search for extraterrestrial life forms. The search was successful, but its results had to be suppressed because of developments that were too sensational even for a sensation-loving public. Then there was Walter Gilman, a student of mathematics who seemed to have found a way to transcend the strictures of time and space, but who met his end in a bizarre attack by rats. These things happened after I left Arkham, but I took care to keep myself informed of its doings. I left Arkham but it never left me.

  How can I describe my first impressions of Arkham? Old it was, certainly, and dark. A dark city, even in the bright daylight of a September afternoon. As a Bostonian, I was used to narrow streets and gambrel roofs, but it was not architecture alone that created the darkness of Arkham, although the sepia and garnet-coloured bricks of which many of the buildings were made certainly contributed to it. Its situation in the river valley caused mists to gather and the air to seem heavier than in the surrounding countryside. Change was slow in Arkham, much slower than elsewhere, even in this century of spectacular change. Whatever the reason, people sometimes spoke of the ‘Arkham malaise.’ Some could not abide it and left, never to return. Others, artists mainly, throve on it, until it sickened them. I found it strangely congenial, until the end.

  When I first saw the town, in the late afternoon, with its buildings reflected in the dark mirror of the Miskatonic River, I knew that I had come to a place where something waited for me. At that moment, before I had even seen the University or the Library, before I had been interviewed, I knew I had come home.

  Two weeks later, in the autumn of 1910, I moved my few possessions into a couple of furnished rooms in a house on Peabody Street and took up my duties as Cataloguer of Greek and Latin in the Library of Miskatonic University.

  Cataloguers are the invisible librarians. People who use libraries rarely consider why the books are arranged as they are, although many believe they should be arranged differently. They flip through the catalogue cards with varying degrees of excitement, impatience, even rage, never thinking that someone must have written the descriptions, selected the classification numbers and assigned the subject headings. Cataloguers do this, weaving the web of words and numbers in unvisited rooms. Mine is very much a profession in which the work is its own reward.

  At the time I came to Miskatonic, handwritten cards were being replaced by typewritten ones. The studious sound of pens scraping along on card stock had been replaced by the rather more lively one of typewriter keys. The fine ‘library hand’ I had taken such pains to learn was nearly obsolete.

  Many thousands of these cards, in their ordered arrangement within specially constructed wooden cabinets, constituted the public card catalogue, which occupied the echoing main hall of the Library with its tessellated floor, dark beams and high, arched windows. We who ministered to it were solemn and concentrated as we worked, for we knew ourselves to be gathering the shards of knowledge, ordering them for posterity and fixing them in place with rods of brass.

  I have seen many cataloguing departments in my time, but Miskatonic’s was the first one I grew to know intimately. It was typical, a maze of desks and book carts and cabinets. If I were led there blindfold, I would instantly know where I was from the smell of the place – a compound of dust, printer’s ink, old leather, new buckram, mingled aromas of bag lunches from the staff room, and a suspicion of pipe smoke from Runcible’s office. My desk was in an alcove, along with two wooden cabinets containing the few dozen shelflist drawers given over to the area of Greek and Latin literature.

  I was fortunate in that I had to myself a window. It overlooked a small bricked square where the Library adjoined the Arts Building. I rarely saw anyone walk through it. Nothing grew there except mosses and golden lichens, which patterned the garnet-coloured bricks of the wall like strange flowers.

  The University Librarian was Dr. Henry Armitage, a scholar of great repute, who at this time was at the midpoint of a long and distinguished career (which, nearly twenty years later, would culminate in something very like an exorcism). My immediate superior was Peter Runcible, a perpetually disgruntled man, at once ashamed to be a mere librarian and resentful of those who did not respect his title of Principal Cataloguer and Head of the Cataloguing Department.

  One day, a few months after I took up my post, I was in the book stacks, engaged in tracking down some old volumes of Cicero. I had found the information I needed and was on my way back to the Cataloguing Department, when I noticed several large books slumped on their shelf like victims of a street accident. They were victims indeed, I thought, as I bent down to straighten them, of a careless shelver who really should be taken to task.

  As I rose to my feet, someone spoke behind me. “Young Mr. Milburn,” said Dr. Armitage. “So Runcible has you shelf-reading now?”

  “No sir,” I replied. “I had an errand in the Roman literature section – a cataloguing matter. I noticed that these books were falling over and stopped to straighten them. I hate to see books in pain.” I stopped, blushing, when I realized what I had said.

  “Books in pain!” repeated Dr. Armitage, with a laugh. “Spoken like a true bibliophile. Do you collect?”

  “No sir, but I feel for books. They’re like us in some ways.”

  “Well, I can’t reproach you for looking out for the welfare of the collection,” said Dr. Armitage. He hesitated. “You’re a classicist, aren’t you? Of course you are – honours in Greek and Latin from Amherst. How would you like to be the keeper of the Necronomicon?”

  “I don’t know, sir. What is it that I would be doing?” And what, I wondered, is the Necronomicon?

  “Dealing with a bunch of confounded nuisances,” Armitage replied. “Or, to be serious, with researchers into the obscure and the occult. Come to my office, if you can spare a few minutes. I’ll descri
be the job and you can decide if you want it.”

  The Library’s Administration Office occupied a spacious set of rooms on the second floor. I had been there only a few times, enough to have developed a healthy respect for Miss Edith Hardy, personal secretary to the University Librarian.

  She gave me a sharp look as I followed Dr. Armitage into his office. She must have thought that the new cataloguer was being called on the carpet for some misdemeanour. I saw a flicker of amusement pass over her face as she returned to her typewriter.

  “What do you know about the Necronomicon?” asked Dr. Armitage.

  “Not a great deal,” I said, carefully.

  “It’s a work of medieval… mysticism, I suppose you could call it,” said Dr. Armitage. “Miskatonic’s copy is a relatively late edition, printed in the 17th century, in Spain. But its origins certainly are much older than that – 8th century, I am told. The author was an Arab of Yemen, Abdul Alhazred.”

  “Is it in Arabic?” I asked. “Because that’s a language I do not know at all.”

  “No, ours is a Latin translation, by one Olaus Wormius. It was bequeathed to Miskatonic by an alumnus. Scholars write to me from all over the country, pleading to be permitted a sight of it. I’m too busy to deal with all that correspondence. I thought I had solved the problem when I appointed John Bowen to the task. He was the obvious choice, being the Rare Books Librarian. But now that he’s on sabbatical at the Bodleian, I have to find someone else.”

  “What about Miss Dodge?” I asked. “She’s Mr. Bowen’s replacement as Rare Books Librarian, isn’t she?”

  Dr. Armitage sighed. “Yes she is,” he said. “But there’s a… tradition, I suppose you could call it, here at Miskatonic, that the Necronomicon is not fit to be viewed by respectable women. Some of the illustrations are thought to be… excessive. And the book is considered to be ‘evil,’ for some reason. It’s probably nonsense, but altogether it seems politic to appoint a man to the job. Well, Milburn, what do you say?”

  “I’d like to do it, sir,” I said. “It might be an interesting experience.”

  “Oh it’ll be interesting all right. You can’t imagine some of the characters you’ll have to deal with. Well, shall I introduce you to the tome?” He took a key from his desk drawer and led me to a formidable steel door at the end of a short hallway. Inside the vault, a table occupied most of the small space between ranks of drawers. He unlocked one and carefully lifted out a volume bound in black leather and fastened with tarnished silver clasps.

  “This is it,” he said, placing it on the table.

  I have heard people say, in late years, that the Necronomicon does not exist, has never existed, that it was the creation of a pulp fiction writer from Providence. This is not true. It exists. I have held a copy in my hands, have turned its pages, have read sections of it. It did not corrupt me or strike me blind, although some of the illustrations were disturbing. Eventually, it did something to me, but of a more subtle nature.

  It was a quarto-sized volume, printed on a fine grade of laid paper, in a type which to my eye seemed archaic for the 17th century. The binding was black cowhide, rather coarse in texture but well made. The heavy silver clasps were, like the typeface, archaic, making the book appear older than it was. (It is not true, by the way, that it is bound in human skin; this is another foolish notion that its notoriety has generated).

  Dr. Armitage described the procedure for examining prospective researchers, finishing with, “Well, I must hurry along now. Let me put the book away and ask Miss Hardy to give you the keys you will need.”

  Miss Hardy was less than impressed by this request. She looked me up and down as though she doubted I was clean enough to enter her well-ordered realm. She turned a questioning eye toward Dr. Armitage.

  “Are you certain this young man can deal properly with the researchers?” she asked. “Some of them are very persistent, you know.”

  “I have every confidence in Mr. Milburn’s abilities to distinguish a sincere researcher from a fraudulent one,” replied Dr. Armitage. “Please give him the keys to the vault and show him the small interview room.” Then he was gone.

  Miss Hardy turned back to me. “I trust that Dr. Armitage has described the procedures you are to follow,” she said, and proceeded to describe them all over again, in great detail. “You realize, of course, that you must not admit anyone to the vault. Researchers must remain in the interview room. You bring them the books they need, one at a time, but only after you are satisfied as to their motives and qualifications. And you must under no circumstances leave any of them alone with a book, especially that one.” At the end of her lecture she removed a set of keys from a cupboard and gave them to me.

  I was profuse in my reassurances that I would observe every precaution in discharging my new duties, and beat a retreat to the Cataloguing Department, from which I had been absent for at least an hour. As luck would have it, Peter Runcible was the first person I met on my return.

  “So you’ve returned to us, have you, Mr. Milburn?” he said. “I understand you had to do some stack research. You must have done enough by now to write a book, not just catalogue one.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I replied. “I met Dr. Armitage in the stacks, and he asked me to do something.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Look after the Necronomicon while Mr. Bowen is away.”

  Runcible’s face darkened with anger. “Why should you do that? You’re a cataloguer, not a rare book specialist. And you’re a member of my staff, moreover. I must have a word with him about this.”

  He strode out of the department and I returned to my desk. I do not know if Runcible ever did protest to Dr. Armitage, but he kept a close account of the time I spent on ‘extradepartmental business,’ and required me to make it up in additional work.

  I found it a worthwhile exchange. For one thing, I had access to the other books in the vault. Also of interest to scholars of the Necronomicon was The Summoning of Demons, by someone who styled him- or herself only as The Initiated One. It was a repellent little volume, duodecimo, the pages badly stained, bound in an overly smooth leather which, for all I knew, may very well have been human skin. There was a beautiful 16th century compilation of alchemical writings, the Liber Arcana Vitae, printed in France, with engravings so fiendishly detailed and lively, that they rivalled anything by Durer. And there was a fully illustrated copy of Sir Richard Burton’s Ananga-ranga, or, The Hindu Art of Love, which I assumed was kept in the vault for reasons besides its rarity and intrinsic value. I admit I consulted it a little more often than was strictly necessary.

  Over the next several months I dealt with eight researchers. I felt it necessary to exclude only one of them. This individual, whose name I have forgotten, did not inspire levity; indeed, he was rather frightening. When I told him that I could not allow him access to the work he sought because of a lack of academic credentials, he cursed me before he left the room. At least, I think the words he uttered were a curse, judging only by their tone, because the language was unknown to me.

  Several months after my encounter with Dr. Armitage, one of the junior clerks arrived in my alcove to announce that a gentleman wanted to see me about obtaining access to the Necronomicon.

  Expecting someone elderly and bearded, as my previous clients had been, I was surprised to see a young man, my own age or a few years older. He was short and slight, elegantly dressed in a long navy-blue coat. With his blond hair and gold-rimmed spectacles he looked in complete contrast to the homely, indeed shabby, surroundings of the Cataloguing Department. He came toward me, hand extended.

  “Mr. Milburn, I believe? I’m Herbert West, Miskatonic University Medical School. Someone in your Administration Office said you’re the person to ask about getting a look at the Necronomicon. I wonder if you could spare a few minutes now.”

  “How do you do, Mr. West,” I replied, taking his hand and trying to collect my wits. I felt as though I had been buffeted by a
sudden gust of cold wind. The sensation was bracing, but startling. His hand was thin and cold, but his grip was firm. The air around him seemed cold too, as though part of the chilly March day had come inside with him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not possible for me to let you see the Necronomicon immediately. There are procedures that must be carried out first.”

  “Procedures,” he repeated, with a slight emphasis, as though he thought I was a child who had used a word too big for me. “Yes, of course, Miskatonic is full of procedures. What do you require? Three signatures in blood? Or an oath sworn – but not on the Bible, surely?” He smiled then, and I felt that a gift of rarity and value had been bestowed upon me.

  “That will not be necessary,” I said. “Endorsements from two or three of your professors, written in ink, will suffice. The usual… procedure is to make an appointment with me for an interview. Would three days be enough time for you to obtain the necessary letters? I can see you on Thursday at three o’clock, in the Administration Office.”

  In the face of his lightness and what I can describe only as brilliance, I felt heavy and plodding, devoid of humour, parroting stodgy rules. But he did not seem particularly annoyed by the small bureaucratic obstacle I had put in his way.

  “Very well, I suppose I can wait another seventy-two hours. Three o’clock Thursday, then.” I could hear his steps, light and rapid, receding along the corridor, and imagined him walking quickly toward the bright day beyond the Library’s doors. I returned to my desk, suddenly tired.

  Herbert West’s visit to the Cataloguing Department had not gone unnoticed by my colleagues. Peter Runcible, fortunately, was absent, but when I went into the staff room for afternoon tea, Alma Halsey, the sciences cataloguer, looked up from the newspaper she had been reading.

  Alma and I were both graduates of the School of Librarianship at Columbia University, but she had left a year before I arrived there.

  “Good thing for you old Runcible wasn’t there when West came in,” she said now. “He would have called you on the carpet for neglect of duties, or at least hung around coughing suggestively. But what on earth would a medical student want with the Necronomicon?”

  “Is he a medical student? Come to think of it, he did mention the Medical School. Do you know him?”

  “Herbert West is notorious at the Med. School. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him. Papa told me he was nearly kicked out last year, for some very strange shenanigans involving dissecting room cadavers. You’d better watch your step. He’s probably trying on a stunt of some kind.”

  I expressed surprise at her suggestion that West had been mixed up in mischief involving cadavers. I could not reconcile such repulsive doings with the elegant young man I had met that afternoon. On the other hand, Alma’s information could not be discounted either, since her father was the Dean of Medicine.

  “Ha! Medical students have been known to do all sorts of disgusting things. They’re inured to gore and grossness. That’s one of the objectives of medical training, you know. But Herbert West has even more experience with corpses than the others.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He used to be an undertaker, or at least an undertaker’s assistant,” said Alma. “His father owns several funeral homes and young Herbert worked in one of them a few summers. Got his hands dirty, you might say.”

  I did not know what to make of this. West and I had exchanged perhaps a dozen sentences, and yet I realized that I had formed a very definite impression about him, an impression that may have been wrong.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll be interviewing him on Thursday. All he needs to do is satisfy me that his hands are clean, his motives are pure and he isn’t carrying a razor, or a scalpel, for that matter. I probably will let him have a look at the Necronomicon. After all, it isn’t a cadaver.”

  On the day appointed I was in the Administration Office a few minutes early. West arrived while I was reviewing my list of questions for the third time.

  As we took our places at the table I had an opportunity to study his appearance more closely. His was a thin face, but saved from narrowness by a certain breadth across the cheekbones. His nose was straight and rather long, and faint lines on either side of his mouth suggested frequent smiles. But his most remarkable features were his eyes. They were of a curious clear grey with darker flecks, like splintered crystals. Combined with long lashes and finely drawn eyebrows, they gave his face a startling, disturbing beauty, impossible to forget.

  After the usual preliminaries, I began the formal questions. They were quite simple – academic credentials and affiliations, and the specifics of the research that made it necessary to consult the Necronomicon.

  He was in his final year of studies at Miskatonic University Medical School, West explained. Next year he would start his internship at St. Mary’s Hospital, but right now he was doing research for a paper he was writing, a wide-ranging inquiry into the history of certain medical practices. “And that’s what led me here,“ he finished. “And, I hope, to the Necronomicon.”

  “I need a little more detail as to the information you are looking for,” I said. “Why the Necronomicon, exactly?”

  “That,” said West, getting up from his chair and pacing around the room, “is a tortuous tale, and not one you really need to know.” He stopped and gave me a hard look with those ice-grey eyes. “Let me say only that I am following hints gleaned from other works. All those roads led me to the Necronomicon. It seems that Alhazred wrote much on the transition from life to death. The actual process, I mean. You can understand that this is a subject of interest to physicians. So I was delighted to discover that there is a copy right here at Miskatonic.”

  His letters of endorsement, from two professors of medicine, and one, surprisingly, of philosophy, were entirely in order. But what about the scandal Alma Halsey had mentioned? Neither of the letters from the Medical School so much as hinted at that. Yet surely that was exactly the sort of thing this screening process was meant to reveal.

  “Mr. West,” I said, “I have been given some information, informally, I admit, to the effect that you were involved in a rather unsavoury business at the Medical School – something to do with… cadavers, I believe?”

  He waved a hand dismissively and sat down again. “Oh that! It was a typical medical student stunt that I got mixed up with in my first year. You know the sort of thing – a bunch of students kidnaps a corpse from the dissecting lab and takes it on a tour of the town. Unfortunately, after the festivities were over we were in no state to smuggle the thing back into the lab, so it ended up in my rooms. The authorities were not amused, of course. They subjected me to more rigorous procedures than this one, I can tell you.” He smiled again, but something in his eyes told me he was lying, and, moreover, that he meant for me to know it. “Look, the way I understand it, you’ll be in the room with me while I consult the book. I have no concealed weapons. What could possibly happen?”

  He was obviously impatient for my verdict, but I was instinctively certain that the Library’s managers, even Dr. Armitage, whose attitude toward the Necronomicon seemed surprisingly casual, would deny this request. There were sufficient grounds for me to give “lack of academic sincerity,” or something of the sort as a reason for refusal. In some obscure way I felt that showing this man the Necronomicon, being present as he turned its leaves and scanned its ancient type with his cold gaze, would create a strange complicity. I felt that I was being presented with a challenge whose nature I could not understand.

  I made a final note, put down my pen and stood up. “Well, Mr. West,” I heard myself say, “I will now bring you the Necronomicon. After all, even if you intend to steal it, I’m quite certain you will not be able to get past our Miss Hardy in the outer office.” I had a vision of Herbert West, the Necronomicon tucked under one arm like a football, the other arm extended, sprinting through the Administration Office, coattails flying, with Miss Hardy preparing to tackle him, a
nd started to laugh.

  West must have been surprised at my unexpected capitulation, but he began to laugh too, and the two of us guffawed together as though we shared some enormously funny secret.

  I went to the vault and lifted the Necronomicon from its drawer. It was heavier than I remembered, and I nearly let it slip. As I adjusted my grip on the book, I became aware of a faint scent which I had not noticed on previous occasions, like that of earth, and of ancient incense. But by the time I left the vault with the tome cradled in my arms, it was gone.

  My usual procedure was to place the book on the table, with instructions for the researcher to take care when turning the pages, to make no marks on them, to refrain from folding or creasing the corners. But this time, I found myself handing the book to West directly. “It’s all yours,” I said, as I let its weight pass from my hands to his. “Within the confines of this room, anyway.”

  He stood with the book in his arms, regarding me with his cool, steady gaze. “I thank you, Charles Milburn,” he said. He turned away from me and laid it on the table. He stood looking at it for a moment, removed his spectacles and polished them, took a notebook and pen from his pockets and sat down. He opened the notebook and looked at something written in it. Only then did he turn to the Necronomicon.

  West leafed through the book, obviously seeking a specific passage. Having apparently found it, he read intently for a while. His lips moved as he read, and once he muttered something.

  Suddenly he motioned me over. “Look here, Milburn, my Latin leaves much to be desired. You’re a classicist, I understand. Come and translate something for me, will you? What does this say?”

  I went over and looked at the passage he indicated, and read it while he watched. I still do not understand what happened then. The literal meaning of the words I read was clear enough. I wrote down a translation quite easily. But immediately afterward, I forgot it completely. It was like the sensation of speaking while in the throes of a head cold – one knows what words one is saying, but cannot hear them. It was as though the part of my brain that read was disconnected from the part that comprehended.

  Later, trying to remember what I had read and written, the best I could come up with was a few disconnected phrases, portentous and scriptural. I had forgotten the words, but I retained an impression that what I had read went beyond life and death to the ultimate foundations of existence.

  When I had finished translating the section he wanted, I waited until West found another and repeated the process, with the same strange result. An hour went by, then another. By now it was nearly six o’clock, and I was not surprised when Miss Hardy tapped on the door and opened it. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” she said, “but I must ask you to leave soon. I will be locking up the Office, and you cannot remain here.”

  “Certainly, Miss Hardy,” I said. “If you need more time, Mr. West, we can meet again tomorrow, or some other day.”

  He looked up, seeming rather dazed, as though he too had forgotten where he was. Then he dropped his pen and sprang to his feet. “Actually, I’m finished now. Your timing is impeccable, Miss Hardy.” He turned such a charming smile on the woman that she quite melted, an astonishing sight.

  “Oh Mr. West,” she said, “don’t hurry yourself on my account. There are one or two small things I can do here yet, if you need more time.”

  “No, really, I’m finished. This has been most valuable. I thank you sincerely for the opportunity. And you too, Mr. Milburn,” he said, turning to me. Quickly, he gathered up his materials and put on his coat, while I locked the Necronomicon away once more.

  The three of us left the Administration Office together. West appeared to have taken a shine to Miss Hardy, for he went down the corridor with her, speaking animatedly of I don’t know what.

  I went back to the Cataloguing Department, which was now dark and deserted. My nerves jangled with anticlimax, even though nothing much had happened. A man had looked at an old book and made some notes with my help. He would go off and write a paper on some obscure topic, citing the fabled Necronomicon as a source, as many others had done before him. Or he would not. It made no difference to me. And surely, now that he had achieved whatever his objective was, nothing I said or did could make any difference to him.

  In the weeks that followed, I saw Herbert West several times – behind the wheel of a sporty Pierce-Arrow roadster, or with a group of other young men, probably fellow medical students, or talking intently with a man who looked like a professor. On yet another occasion, I saw him in the town with two men who wore suits but did not look like academics.

  Once only did I meet him face to face, in a narrow thoroughfare known as Howard’s Alley, a popular short cut from town to campus. West was walking quickly toward me, head down, seemingly thinking hard. As we passed he glanced up and I prepared to greet him, but my words remained unsaid. On his face was no look of recognition. His grey eyes, the colour of a winter sky, stared straight through me, seeing something known to Herbert West alone.